A Profile of ACHE's 2024–2025 Chair

After finishing his undergraduate work in sociology at the University of Notre Dame, William “Bill” P. Santulli, FACHE, set his career sights on becoming a sociologist. The New York native credits that early desire to work in academia to the inquisitiveness and zeal for tackling complex problems he’d learned from his father growing up on Long Island. 

Though Santulli ultimately chose a different path, those qualities have continued to serve him well through an exemplary career in healthcare leadership that has taken him and his family from the Midwest to both coasts and back to the Midwest. 

Most recently, Santulli has served since 2022 as president, midwest region, Advocate Health, Oak Brook, Ill., which was created from the merger of Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health. There, he oversees a $14.7 billion operating budget and all delivery system operations, including 27 hospitals, more than 400 ambulatory sites and clinics, and more than 4,000 providers.

Highlights of his tenure at Advocate Aurora Health include: increasing safety event reporting by 84%, increasing the number of people of color in management by 27%, increasing diversity spend by 75% and, from 2017 to 2022, saving the federal government $600 million through one of the most successful Medicare shared savings programs in the U.S.

Colleagues attribute much of Santulli’s success to his curiosity, integrity and open, compassionate leadership style.

Curiosity, Compassion, Consensus

“Bill always seeks to understand others and is committed to lifelong learning,” observes Jim Skogsbergh, FACHE, CEO, Advocate Health, who has been one of Santulli’s most significant mentors and a colleague for 28 years. Skogsbergh served as president and CEO, Advocate Aurora Health, prior to the merger. 

Skogsbergh says the strengths as a collaborative team player, team leader and consensus builder that Santulli has shown throughout his career at Advocate, including his earlier positions as COO, Advocate Aurora Health, executive vice president and COO of Advocate Health Care and as CEO of Advocate Good Samaritan, Downers Grove, Ill., will translate seamlessly to his role as the 2024–2025 Chair of ACHE. 

Other colleagues agree, pointing to his generosity and approachability. “One of Bill’s attributes that I deeply admire is his style of being fully engaged and yet first to celebrate success by sharing the credit with others,” says Mark R. Neaman, LFACHE, past ACHE Chair. “This quality makes Bill a wonderful mentor and developer of talent.” 

Eugene A. Woods, FACHE, CEO, Advocate Health (co-CEO with Skogsbergh), believes Santulli’s commitment to operational excellence, anchored in a deep-rooted desire to help people live well, will be an asset to ACHE in a time of transformation. “Bill has a distinguished career in developing leaders to perform at their very highest levels.  As Chair of the ACHE board, I have no doubt that he will help to enhance the capabilities of current healthcare executives and the next generation as well.”

Santulli’s commitment to those values manifests in his 40 years of ACHE participation at the chapter level and as a member of the Board of Governors and its Finance Committee, as well as in the priorities he’s defined for his term as ACHE Chair.

Focus Areas for 2024–2025

One of those priorities is furthering ACHE’s focus on supporting leaders and organizations in their journey to high reliability, building on the comprehensive safety blueprint developed in 2017 during the term of Charles D. Stokes, FACHE, as ACHE Chair. “We can’t rest as an industry until we eliminate serious safety events and patient harm,” Santulli says. 

Another priority is to help ACHE’s 49,000 members continue learning to lead through the lens of equity. “The COVID-19 pandemic shone a spotlight on the stark health inequities that exist in the U.S.,” Santulli says. “This, coupled with the effects of institutional racism, underscores how critical it is for healthcare leaders to foster inclusion and equity in our leadership teams and workforces. The richness of having a variety of perspectives helps us make better decisions. When we embrace the power of difference, we perform better.” 

Santulli credits ACHE’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion with helping him sharpen his own focus and accelerate his commitment as a leader to DEI. He believes the lessons he’s learned in recent work at Advocate Health will, in turn, help support ACHE’s ongoing efforts in this area.

That work has included building DEI into senior leadership incentive plans and goals aimed at, among other things, ensuring that all people have the same access to care and care experience, and closing care gaps.

A third priority is bolstering ACHE’s connections with its 76 chapters by undertaking a thorough review and strengthening of the chapter model. “We’re going to put a lot of energy into determining how we can do a better job of supporting our chapters,” he says. 

Finally, Santulli will continue to lead the $1 Million Campaign for the Healthcare Leaders of Tomorrow, launched in 2023. The campaign seeks to raise $1 million in scholarship funds by 2025 to support a diverse pool of talented individuals in pursuing healthcare leadership careers. 

According to Jean Abraham, PhD, James A. Hamilton Chair in Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota, Santulli’s grasp of such issues as workforce shortages, health equity and financial performance, along with his willingness to listen, learn and mentor others, will help him advance ACHE’s work developing leaders. “Bill approaches discussions with an open mind, asks excellent questions, encourages broad participation and carefully reflects on the tradeoffs of any decision,” Abraham says.

How Healthcare Took Hold

For Santulli, the seeds of a long and diverse career in healthcare leadership germinated while pursuing a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Florida, Gainesville. While serving  as a research associate in the department of community health, Santulli saw that healthcare could satisfy his desire to contribute to the welfare of society while providing the stimulation and rewards of a complex business environment he had come to value. 

“I liked that healthcare offered a nice intersection between supporting the social good and leading a business,” Santulli says. 

The fact that so much of healthcare leadership involved relationship building also drew Santulli to the field. “As someone who tends to be extroverted, I knew I would like that,” he says. 

After earning his master’s degree in sociology, Santulli’s burgeoning interest in the healthcare field quickly led him to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a master’s degree in healthcare administration with a concentration in financial management. His training there included an administrative residency at Metropolitan Medical Center, Minneapolis, that coincided with the organization’s merger with United Hospital, St. Paul. 

“I was in the room when a lot of those merger conversations were taking place,” Santulli remembers. That early immersion in major strategic decision making, along with his exposure to the tumult of a nursing strike and Medicare’s introduction of diagnosis-related groups in 1983, gave Santulli insights into the intricacies of healthcare management that have stayed with him and deepened his interest in the field. “I never looked back,” he says. 

An administrative fellowship at the HealthWest Foundation, Chatsworth, Calif., soon followed. There, Santulli worked on a pioneering team that developed the first health plan in the country to capitate hospitals that took full risk. Santulli says this experience in health plan innovation with one of the most progressive health systems in one of the most competitive markets in the country taught him the value of challenging the status quo and taking risks as a leader. 

Another pivotal moment in Santulli’s career was being named assistant vice president at Good Samaritan Hospital, Puyallup, Wash., where then CEO Dave Hamry, LFACHE, took a chance on him—a young executive with virtually no management experience. Santulli says his years in the Pacific Northwest gave him a solid grounding in performance management, executing against operating budgets and other key facets of leadership. “I’m deeply grateful to Dave for giving me a tremendous amount of responsibility at an early age,” he says.

After completing his administrative fellowship in 1985, Santulli and Elizabeth Reynolds, who he met while at the University of Minnesota MHA program, married. 

“She was in the class immediately behind me,” says Santulli. “We met at a school sponsored social function shortly after she started graduate school. After our honeymoon we relocated to Seattle, as she had landed an administrative fellowship at Virginia Mason.”

After her fellowship, Elizabeth had the opportunity to lead Virgina Mason’s occupational health service until the couple’s twin girls were born in October of 1988. 

“A couple of months later we relocated to Los Angeles, and Elizabeth became a full time homemaker and has done a phenomenal job of raising our five children and navigating our multiple moves across the country. I would not have been able to devote so much time and energy to my professional life without Elizabeth’s incredible support of our me and our kids.”

A Partnership Is Born

Over the next decade, Santulli held a series of executive positions with increasing responsibilities at Valley Hospital Medical Center, Van Nuys, Calif.; Central Iowa Health System, Des Moines, Iowa; and New England Medical Center, Boston. 

It was when he joined Central Iowa Health System as senior vice president (also serving later as COO) that Santulli first worked with Skogsbergh, who was the system’s executive vice president at the time. Thus began one of the most enduring and important partnerships of Santulli’s career.

“Jim is one of the best in the industry at building the relationships that are at the heart of healthcare,” he says. “He’s an extraordinary leader and communicator who has coached and supported me on so many levels. I have had the privilege of working with Jim for 28 years—he empowered me to always bring my best self to our organization and to continuously learn, grow and execute.”

In 1999, Santulli was named COO of New England Medical Center (now Tufts Medical Center). Santulli notes that the role’s multifaceted exposure to the complexity of an academic medical center with a faculty practice plan and a large research budget enriched his knowledge of the field and his perspectives as a leader. 

In the meantime, Skogsbergh had moved to Advocate Health Care as COO. Not long after, he and Santulli began discussing the possibility of rejoining forces. Just five months after Skogsbergh landed in Chicago, Santulli followed to lead Advocate Good Samaritan. 

When Skogsbergh took the helm as president and CEO of Advocate Health Care in 2002, he asked Santulli to join his team as COO. Santulli remained on board when, in 2018, Advocate Health Care merged with Aurora Health Care, Milwaukee, to become Advocate Aurora Healthcare, and he played a key role in merger and post-merger discussions. 

Skogsbergh credits Santulli’s successes in large part to his unwavering honesty, respect and inclusiveness, and to his commitment to openness and visibility as a leader. “Bill relates well to others at all levels of the organization and in our communities in Illinois and Wisconsin,” he says.

Throughout his career, Santulli has managed to devote time to numerous non-profit boards, including ACHE and other healthcare associations, civic associations, athletic organizations and health system subsidiary boards. His willingness to listen to differing and opposing opinions on the challenging and divisive negotiation of a revised Medicaid hospital assessment program, when he served as board chair of the Illinois Health and Hospital Association in 2018, helped guide the organization through a difficult time, says A.J. Wilhelmi, the association’s president and CEO, and an ACHE Member. Santulli also serves on two investor-owned boards: Renovo Solutions, a healthcare and life science asset management company, and Movn Health, a virtual cardiac rehabilitation organization. 

Richard J. Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, voices a similar view, noting that Santulli’s ability to navigate complexity, synthesize information and communicate rapidly changing protocols helped drive Advocate Aurora Health’s nimble response during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Bill’s leadership and change management skills helped transform care delivery in ways that will last long beyond the pandemic,” he says. 

Amid pressing issues of affordability, equity, safety and the need to deliver extraordinary patient and consumer experiences, “healthcare leaders have tremendous opportunities to innovate,” Santulli says. 

“ACHE is uniquely positioned to help them develop new competencies to navigate this tumultuous time and to redefine health and wellness,” he says. 

Santulli points to ACHE’s quick embrace of the digital environment and development of highly successful virtual offerings for members as evidence. “ACHE’s demonstrated ability to quickly transform will continue to serve the organization and its members well. The organization will play a vital role in advancing healthcare management during these unprecedented times. I’m excited to be a part of that.”

Susan Birk is a Chicago-based freelance writer specializing in healthcare.